


Dreams and Microfissures

by StorytellerSecrets



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Giving her the cartharis she deserves, I know no one's wondering but yes Lapis Lazuli is a sub a lil' bit ok, Lapis Lazuli Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Lapis Lazuli Needs a Hug (Steven Universe), Lapis coming to the understanding that she can still be okay without being okay, Listen I know she's growing and that's great but I need her to know that it's okay to be broken, POV Lapis Lazuli (Steven Universe), Random & Short, Sad Lapis Lazuli (Steven Universe), and I need to Tell Her Things, and that even if she never get's any better than she already is she still deserves nice things, and that no matter what it's going to be okay, i just, need to have a talk with Lapis Lazuli
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-30 18:48:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21432994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StorytellerSecrets/pseuds/StorytellerSecrets
Summary: There were things that Lapis remembered clearer than the air itself. The mirror, for example, she remembered nearly every moment of. But there were other things. These were the things she remembered . . . less. It was as though someone had taken to her memories like a filing cabinet and plucked file after file from her and inked out every other sentence with water.Or: Lapis is asked a question, and thinks about more than the answer.Or Or: A discombobulated character study of Lapis Lazuli and her relationship with sleep. In this essay I will
Relationships: Lapis Lazuli & Steven Universe, Lapis Lazuli & sleep
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	Dreams and Microfissures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LostAndDowned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostAndDowned/gifts).

> me: has so many WIPS and fics I need to write/update  
me: has a full course load and is drowning in homework  
me: has literally a billion other things I need to be doing  
me: writes a fanfiction about sleeping
> 
> I seriously don't know what this turned into. (Any errors are due to being written on my phone at like three in the morning a week and a half ago.)

"Hey, Lapis?" Steven asked one day when he came to visit the barn. He shifted from foot to foot and rubbed one arm, waiting for an answer. Lapis glanced down from her perch at her hammock. From outside, the noise of Peridot's tractor roared along with Pumpkin's distant barking.

The glance of acknowledgement was all Steven needed. He looked back up to her, determined.

"Why do you like sleeping?" he finished, and Lapis raised an eyebrow. To her, it was strange not that Steven would ask her this, but that it would sound so _normal._

As of recent, Steven had taken on a role not unlike an untrained therapist trying to share their knowledge acquired from multiple self-help books (books Lapis knew well enough about if the corner of the library she visited every other weekend was anything to go by). As such, "Hey Lapis, do you like the color blue because you're blue and you associate it with yourself, or do you hate it because of the time you spent trapped in an ocean?", "Do you think you're afraid of water because you fear yourself?", and questions of the same pedigree were exponentially more likely than a mundane thing like "Why do you like sleeping?"

Record, color Lapis Lazuli surprised. Well, surprised and blue.

As Steven continued to look on at her with sparkling eyes, Lapis raised her other brow. Then she thought for a moment, trying to properly format a response.

There were things that Lapis remembered clearer than the air itself. The mirror, for example, she remembered nearly every moment of. Her very first breath of air. The moment she'd been dragged from her assignment of terraforming the Earth to her Diamond's desires and the very instant she realized what the mirror in front of her was for. Every moment of her time with Steven, in the cell of Peridot's ship, "I don't want your _garbage._" All of these she remembered well.

But there were other things. Things like Malachite, and the fight with White Diamond, her Diamond's first and only orders to her, (_who was her Diamond why couldn't she remember her Diamond_), the ocean holding her down, everything about the moment she was cracked, and sitting on the moon and watching the people she hated and loved together. These were the things she remembered . . . less.

They were blurry, like she was watching them with her wings over her eyes. It was as though someone had taken to her memories like a filing cabinet and plucked file after file from her and inked out every other sentence with water.

The long and the short of it was that Lapis Lazuli had been cracked, and even though she had been healed, there were wounds that even Steven's saliva couldn't heal. Microfissures, Peridot had called them once when Lapis had proposed a theoretical. Punctures that could never be mended, surrounding her gem and showing themselves through the glitches in her neurological pathways.

When Lapis had first fallen asleep, she'd woken up with a hazy fog over her mind, and she'd nearly panicked herself into a fit until she'd learned that she wasn't always _supposed_ to remember her time asleep. That it was up to the part of her gem that worked, even if it wasn't up to her. That is wasn't just another part of her being broken.

Even in her nightmares, there was a certain kind of freedom that came with being trapped inside herself instead of someone else's cage. It was liberating, being a slave only to her own mind, no matter how cruel that mind was.

So really, she liked it because of the control. Throughout her existence, Lapis had varying degrees of control over her autonomy, and very rarely anyone else's, and knowing that while she slept she was in control without having to be _i__n control_ was liberating.

She remembered, and this was the only thing about it that she really did remember, vividly, how it felt to fight for control with Malachite, pushing and pulling until the very ground beneath her caved under the pressure. She remembered how much she liked it, being the dictator.

And she remembered how it felt to be collared. To be chained, trapped, and constrained by the pushing forces of dominance, first by the cruelty of (_...of?_ She didn't remember) and then, later, by the Crystal Gems' ignorance.

This was both. This was neither. Sleeping was a luxury she'd taught herself through weeks and months of trial and error, and it was one she wouldn't give away for anything short of a Diamond invasion. Sleeping gave her the freedom she'd had at the top of the ocean, when she was reaching for a star she could hardly see from both glitched vision and distance.

And, as she remembered and concluded these things, Lapis realized she was perhaps a bit obsessed with the idea of individuality. She didn't just want to be a person, she wanted to _be_ a _person._ She wanted to think, to dream, to dare. She wanted to want for as long as she could.

And, maybe in a locked and chained part of her, she wanted this place to be home. Maybe, somewhere, in the back of her head, she wanted to fight for her home, for her each and every desire. As impossible as it sounded, it was possible that part of her heart was yearning to be as a Crystal Gem. And that, maybe, while part of her was wanting, a bigger part of her already was.

Maybe in this world of maybes, maybe meant something with more certainty. Like definitely. And if that were true, then maybe . . . well. Perhaps Lapis would be the same, or perhaps a star would over a Diamond.

In her world of certainty, maybe maybe meant maybe. Maybe it didn't. But there was no star, and there was no Diamond, just as there were no other brands of ownership she'd ever wear for a very long time. Instead, there were other things.

Things like her Meep Morps and her hammock, things like laughing in the face of danger and looking the devil straight in the face and playing baseball with it. Things that all screamed **REBELLION!** in bolded and black capital letters. And there were things like sleeping and running through an open field of corn and marathoning videos of a show she liked. Things that all whispered 𝓇𝓊𝓃 in a silent font meant for cursive but given to her.

These were all things, sometimes, many of which she couldn't remember, that made her wonder if anyone had ever felt the particular way she felt before, a little prideful and a little smug but mostly awake and alive and beautiful in a way she'd only ever called the stars. There were things that made her wonder who she was, and there were things that made her want to find out.

So maybe Lapis wasn't a Crystal Gem. So maybe Lapis wasn't a good person at all. So maybe, maybe, maybe. But maybe she didn't need to be.

Maybe Lapis Lazuli was enough. Maybe, maybe, definitely.

So, despite her lack of clear purpose and drive, never again could the world say Lapis Lazuli was passionless. Indeed, she was thriving in the very vein of it. Never could they again call her broken, for all around her was fixed and fixing, even when all she could see was blurred. And never again could any person call her a Homeworld Gem, not when she was so clearly placed in her home.

She was a Lapis Lazuli who called herself that, who went to Earth for a respectable purpose and who was stepped on and used like a toy, and she was a Lapis Lazuli who broke until she learned she didn't have to heal. She was the Lapis who wanted with the heat of a sun, and she was the Lapis who dreamed. And in a world of possibilities, maybe one day she'd learn to fight for her dreams. Either way, Lapis Lazuli would always be herself.

So there: that was her answer. The reason she liked to sleep. The reason she liked at all. She wanted it, and she fought for it in the form of hammocks and Stupid Sleep Stories she told herself and an awful lot of tears at the beginning, and she _wanted_ to fight for it, and she wanted that want to remain, even if she couldn't say or follow through with any of it.

"I just want to." With every word she said, like the dawn of a new day, a haze lifted from her eyes and Lapis Lazuli very possibly began to be the first "self-healing" gem. (Inside her, a canyon that started to fill.)

Steven nodded. "Can I ask another one?" he asked and Lapis shrugged, feigning apathy. Steven raised a finger to his chin and his eyes narrowed in a recently characteristic way.

"Do you like sleeping because of the freedom it represents or because of the confinement it causes? And also can we go outside? I wanna go build a cornman and eat him before he eats us."

Lapis grinned as she rolled her eyes and swooped down from her hammock like a hawk going in for the kill, grabbing Steven from underneath the arms and swooping out the window.

Classic Steven.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope it's cohesive enough to make sense. Please review, and thanks for reading!


End file.
